The concept of Lebensraum
To understand the thinking of adolfhitler, which consolidated the Nazi ideology and produced horrors like the burnt offering, we need to know what the Fuhrer of III Reich understood how "Living Space” or, in German, Lebensraum.
The concept of Lebensraum became popular in the 19th century, after the Unificationgerman, through the works of the geographer Friedrichratzel. As is well known, the nineteenth century was the century of imperialism and neocolonialism. Many of the European nations and countries on other continents, such as the United States and Japan, have committed themselves to conquer large tracts of land in order to ensure full development of their capabilities economical. Ratzel, who had visited the US at the height of the Monroe Doctrine, then went on to conceive a geopolitical doctrine that defended that every “race or people with superior civilizational gifts” would need a vast physical space for its full development. The conquest of this “living space” depended on the subjugation of “inferior peoples or races”, occupying territories “unworthy” of them.
Hitler and the expansion of the concept of Lebensraum
Ratzel's perspective had great repercussions among German nationalists after the First World War, given that the german empire it had broken down with the war and, as a result, it had lost important parts of its territory, such as the Alsace-Lorraine, and also its colonies in Africa. When Hitler began to mature Nazi ideas in the 1920s, the concept developed by Ratzel fit him like a glove. As the American historian Timothy Snyder points out, in his work Black Earth – the holocaust as history and warning, for Hitler, the living space was seen not only in the political-economic sense, but also in the properly ecological sense, that is, of habitat.
This is not to say that Hitler merely drew a direct relationship between nature and politics, as is at first implied. No, he went on to defend the idea that politics was nature and vice versa. Let's see a quote from Snyder, who comments on the work My fight, which Hitler wrote while in prison in 1924:
“Nature knows no political limits,” wrote Hitler. "It puts a form of life in this world and sets them free in the game for power." Since politics was nature, and nature was struggle, there was no political thought possible. This conclusion was an extreme formulation of a nineteenth-century commonplace according to which human activities can be understood as biological manifestations.” [1]
According to Snyder, for Hitler, the “incessant struggle between the races was not an element of life, but its essence”. He also conceived the idea that the Jews were against this natural determinism by giving the world the notions of compassion, faith, universal solidarity, etc. Furthermore, the Nazi leader believed that he himself had a mission to:
[…] rescue the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the blood paradise. as the Homo sapiens can survive only through limitless racial murder, the Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would represent the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a "world view" that would allow it to triumph, which ultimately meant having "faith" in its own natural mission." [2]
The Jews, according to Hitler, could not triumph as an influential civilization because that would represent a threat to the human species - its end -, since the element of zoological struggle, which would have produced its own speciation natural human, would become extinct. With the victory of Jewish morals and the Jewish worldview, humans would perish from weakness, from lack of natural tone, and the Earth would regress to the time before human presence.
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Hitler still believed that doctrines with universalistic pretensions such as Christian morality, liberal democracy and even communism (Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, for example, came from Jewish bloodlines) were products of the Jewish race. All these doctrines eliminated the character mentioned above, of politics as nature, as an expression of a zoological struggle, in which the most capable of conquering its vital space must prevail. These were the main foundations of the anti-SemitismNazi. As Snyder says, "the account of the mass murder of Europe's Jews had to be planetary because Hitler's thinking was ecological, treating Jews as a sore of nature."
East expansion project
This “ecological thinking” of Hitler had its maximum application when there was the Operation Barbarossa, that is, the attack operation on the Soviet Union in 1941. The great Nazi project of territorial expansion had Eastern Europe as its main target, especially the fertile steppes, such as those in Ukraine. The Slavs were considered by Hitler as members of a disorganized race, without the capacity to manage their vast territories and, therefore, should be subjugated and enslaved. With the advance towards the East, provided by the retreat of the Soviet forces, the Nazis began to elaborate projects for the construction of their living space in that region.
Food produced in Ukraine and elsewhere would be diverted to feed the population of Germany and other Western European nations subjected to the III Reich. To do so, it would be necessary to destroy the USSR and, with it, tens of millions of Slavs. The beginning of this process started with the extermination of the jews who lived in the East, mainly Poles (in Auchwitz alone some 1,500,000 were killed).
The second step would be to starve the Slav population. Stalin himself had already done this in 1932-1933 with the Ukrainians, but for other purposes. Hitler was thinking of the same strategy, only with a view to the total colonization of the region. As Snyder says:
Hitler's axiom of life as a hunger war and his intention to wage a hunger campaign against the Slavs were reflected in political documents drawn up after their rise to power in Germany in 1933. A Famine Plan created under the authority of Hermann Göring predicted that "many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and die or emigrate to Siberia." [3]
Lebensraum, food and population growth
The cruel logic of the notion of Lebensraum Hitler's defense also relied on the idea that food resources could become scarce for any nation with a large population. This kind of understanding stemmed from the fact that the world had not yet known the green revolution, that is, the mechanization of agriculture and the application of fertilizers to the soil to make it arable. This reality would only appear after World War II. Hitler believed that a nation, in order to guarantee food for its "race", needed to withdraw food from other races by force – including eliminating the weaker race so that there was no need to feed her.
GRADES
[1] SNYDER, Timothy. Black Earth – the holocaust as history and warning. Trans. Donald M. Garshagen and Renata Guerra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016. P. 16.
[2] Idem. P. 18.
[3]Ibid. pp. 37-38.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
